Abstract

This thesis addresses the question of how socio-political differences and lived experiences of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity may be perceived to manifest in themaking of sound arts and experimental musics with a specific focus upon works made by women. Drawing upon compositions, installations and artist-archives includingworks by Lina Džuverovic, Anne Hilde Neset, Cathy Lane, Emma Hedditch, Sonia Boyce, Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, the research considers the different ways in which the category of “woman” has been historically silenced, erased, ignored and disqualified from and misrepresented within dominant historical sound and music histories. I then ask what representations of “woman” might have materialised within this relational paradigm that “privileges the perspective of an archetypal Western, white, and male subject” as the universal subject of sound (Rodgers 2010b: v)? In particular noise and silence are addressed as the assumed polar limits of sound arts and experimental musics combined with a reconsideration of the fundamental parameters of pitch, timbre and amplitude as sound’s dominant laws, norms and conventions. The analysis of how the artists addressed within the research have in turn used and critiquedhistorically dominant representations through their aesthetic practices aims to demonstrate the ways in which these artists have challenged, resisted or transformedsound art and experimental music practices in the historical present.

This research aims to contribute new insights within the emerging field of feminist sound studies by connecting social and aesthetic processes in contemporary sound artsand experimental music practices within a discourse of feminist composition. Such a discourse seeks to contribute to the materialisation of alternative sound and music economies through the subtle calibration of compositional strategies that seek to displace dominant compositional processes intent upon regulating the noise of the social as a field of normalisation for the reproduction of the individual, self-sovereign anduniversally masculine subject of sound. Ultimately, what this research seeks to contribute is how to experience feminist composition as a social event.